Wednesday, August 19, 2009

What they don't want you to know

An internal city report shows judges threw out or reduced almost all parking tickets challanged in court.
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5 comments:

ppatin said...

The one time I went to court to fight a parking citation (I was falsely cited for abandoning my car, which is odd seeing as how I drove it to work every day) not a single parking agent bothered to show up. In addition to that judges know that parking enforcement has a habit of writing BS tickets. Most of the time the bad ones are for small violations (20 to 40 dollars) and the parking enforcement clowns know that almost nobody with a real job will take time off from work to fight a $25 citation.

Wed Aug 19, 01:36:00 PM EDT
Maurice Bradbury said...

I think most people do know this, it's just cheaper to pay up than take hours off to work to fight a ticket.

I did once when I was morally outraged over a BS ticket.. had to go to sketch-azz North & Harford, park at a meter, it smells bad, everybody's PO'd and it can take a pretty long time to be heard... you get to hear everybody else's excuses, though... Baltimoreans at their Baltimoriest!

Wed Aug 19, 02:00:00 PM EDT
ppatin said...

The only time I bothered to fight was the BS abandoned car one (that ticket would've been $150!) I've gotten a couple of bogus tickets that were about $25, I accepted them as the price of living in the city.

It sounds like the District Court in South Baltimore is much nicer than the one you had to go to.

Wed Aug 19, 03:25:00 PM EDT
MacArthur Media Staff said...

Well I should check in also, because I too have gotten the abandoned vehicle ticket many, many times. I'm noticing a trend here, and I also smell a rat. Abandoned vehicle carries one of the highest citation rates of any writable ticket. Wonder how many times that's been thrown around with abandon (pun intended) by the parking Nazis?

My privately registered, unmarked, no signage having van was once ticketed as a commercial vehicle parked in a residential zone (in front of my house). I went to Patapsco to fight it and somehow lost. The bastards! It was not a commercial vehicle, nor did it meet any of the vehicular code criteria of such. I swear, the folks are outrageous!

Wed Aug 19, 09:37:00 PM EDT
Stephen said...

I've gotten a couple parking tickets (forgot about street cleaning once, parked too long in a 2-hour parking zone, etc) that I deserved.

The only time I contested a ticket was when I received a $250 ticket for accidentally parking in a poorly-marked handicapped parking zone over by UB. It was raining, dark, I didn't know the area, the curb/parking spot was not painted/marked, and the only sign was at one end of the block on a pole 12 feet in the air. I would NEVER do that on purpose; it's bad karma.

I requested a hearing but never heard anything about it again. Could be that the car was registered in PA at the time...

Thu Aug 20, 12:10:00 AM EDT

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